| Due to the violent establishment of "New World" nations and the exclusion of women from most written histories, women in the Americas have inherited a doubly ruptured past. Through the use of historiographic metafictions (in Linda Hutcheon's terms), writers such as Margaret Atwood (English Canada), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe), Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rico), Anne Hebert (Quebec), Nelida Pinon (Brazil), and Leslie Marmon Silko (U.S.Native American) combat this cultural amnesia and work toward establishing a sense of tradition and continuity for Inter-American women. The texts considered here employ the medium of fiction to engage with the past in a two-fold process, first re-defining what constitutes history and merits inclusion in the written record, then using that new version of history to work toward resistance, reconciliation, and recuperation at the familial, national, and regional levels. Silko grounds her call for revolution throughout the Americas in Native American history/mythology. She invokes these same traditions as she invites Euro-Americans to assimilate into Native cultures to save themselves and the planet. Pinon and Conde's polyglossic family sagas model how reconciliation among people of different races, classes, and political persuasions might be effected on a national level, whereas a similar attempt by Ferre's narrator is thwarted by political, historical, and narratological problems. Atwood and Hebert convey the ambiguities of history and our incapacity ever to completely understand past events by utilizing the tropes of gothic fiction to write about two nineteenth-century murder cases. Within a theoretical framework which draws on feminist, New Historicist, and post-colonial approaches, I show how these novels highlight the shortcomings of traditional modes of historiography and offer an array of alternative models demanding that both reader and writer engage with the past more consciously. |
